Details disclosed herein merely offer background information regarding embodiments and are not applicable as prior art.
With the remarkable development of information communication technology, various kinds of terminal devices such as a mobile communication terminal and a personal computer are evolving to perform a great variety of functions.
For example, today's mobile communication terminals not only provide a traditional voice communication function, but also offer various additional functions such as a data communication, a digital camera, a music or video player, a game, a broadcasting receiver, and the like.
In order to expand such functions executable in the terminal device, related technologies are continuously being developed centering on improvement of software as well as improvement of hardware.
Accordingly, various services are provided using the terminal device. One of them, there is a positioning or position determination or position providing service using a personal computer, a portable phone, or the like.
Further, in order to enter information into the terminal device, various input manners such as a keypad based input, a voice input, or an image input are available. Various analysis techniques may be used for analyzing such a voice or image input.
The positioning or position determination or position providing is a technique of identifying a precise location of a user's terminal device. As this technique, a global positioning system (GPS), cell ID based positioning, and the like are well known and widely used.
Also, for indoor positioning, an additional device such as a beacon device installed in an indoor space may be utilized.
Meanwhile, the user of the terminal device located in a certain complicated place such as a complex shopping center and an amusement park may need to know his or her position in order to find a desired destination.
In this case, the use of an additional infrastructure such as a beacon device may incur increases in capital expenditure and operating expense, which may become an obstacle to the activation of the position providing service. In addition, the use of GPS has a drawback of being incapable of determining a precise position of a user in a shadow area such as an indoor or underground area.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a service capable of identifying a user's current position by using only a user's terminal device without requiring any additional infrastructure regardless of GPS shadow areas.